Tired of unproductive meetings that waste valuable time and drain your team's energy? This comprehensive course, A Guide to Effective Meetings, offers the essential strategies to transform your interactions into goal-oriented events that drive projects forward. Designed for both meeting facilitators and participants, you'll acquire practical skills to enhance communication, collaboration, and overall team productivity.

As a meeting facilitator, you will learn to master the art of deliberate planning and execution:

• Define clear objectives and discern when a meeting is truly necessary, avoiding arbitrary scheduling.
• Schedule meetings efficiently by identifying key stakeholders, utilising natural transition times, and leveraging scheduling tools.
• Create a powerful meeting agenda that outlines structure, purpose, discussion topics, and activities, ensuring clarity, focus, and alignment among attendees.
• Implement group facilitation techniques to encourage equal participation, manage discussions effectively, prevent conversations from veering off-topic, and keep meetings on schedule.
• Develop crucial skills for building consensus, guiding groups through problem-solving and decision-making by introducing issues, fostering debate, identifying common ground, and checking for agreement.
• Confidently manage conflict in meetings by focusing on problem-solving, understanding perceived threats, and approaching disagreements with curiosity rather than criticism.

For meeting participants, discover how to become a model attendee and an active contributor to meeting success:

• Prepare thoroughly by reviewing agendas and materials, arriving punctually, and staying fully present without distractions.
• Speak up effectively by overcoming mental barriers like self-censorship and lack of confidence, learning tactics such as "going first," setting speaking goals, and preparing your contributions in advance.
• Voice disagreement respectfully and constructively, introducing alternative perspectives and fostering healthy debate that leads to more informed decision-making.

By completing this course, you will equip yourself with the tools to reduce administrative burden, eliminate wasted time, and foster a culture of productive, impactful meetings that genuinely achieve their objectives.